Silence is clarity and white heat in Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day, a novel about a family reunion, its unease, the disturbing remembrances that accompany it. Tara, now married to a diplomat, revisits her childhood home in Old Delhi and finds that, on the shabby surface, nothing has changed. The mind is forced back into rites of childhood. Anita Desai evokes the heat, the parrots squawking, the changes and nonchanges of characters, their subtle secret movements, and in her evocations is discovery….

But often the vividness of the writing fails to convey a sense of the child's actual life: the vividness is literary. Anita Desai has a pointillist exactitude, conveys the lucency of things sharply sensed in the clear light of day, but lacks apprehension of their depths. Some shadows are clearly missing….

In the general lucency important things suffer. The novel remains a series of images...